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• Introduction

Writing skills and style guides

Cranfield has produced its own suite of interactive online modules designed to enhance your research and writing skills. It explains how to project manage your research and write your thesis or other projects and is available on Canvas: Research and writing skills .

We have also listed some other resources below that might help you develop your use of academic English.

Writing skills

• Academic Phrasebank Produced by the University of Manchester, this guide is designed primarily for non-native speakers of English. It provides a range of examples of academic English in a variety of contexts, including introductions, reporting the literature, critical evaluation, describing methods, reporting results, discussing findings, and writing conclusions.
• How to write your best paper This guide to writing an academic paper or thesis is particularly aimed at business student. Written by EconBiz, it covers the whole process from identifying a research question and literature searching, to referencing and editing.
• Online Writing Lab Free online advice from Purdue University on all aspects of academic writing, including creating a thesis statement, proofreading your work, technical paper writing, literary analysis and criticism, conducting research, and citations.
• Using English for Academic Purposes A suite of resources designed to help students with academic English. The section on writing is particularly helpful, but the site also provides help with speaking, presenting and note-taking.
• Using tenses in scientific writing When you write an experimental report, or draft a thesis chapter, you need to choose which tense, or tenses, to use. This flyer from the University of Melbourne makes you more conscious of what the choice of verb tense involves.

There are also two videos on LinkedIn Learning that you might find useful:

• Word 2016: Creating Long Documents
• Word Training and Tutorials

Style guides

• Cranfield University Editorial Style Guide This guide is is primarily intended for use by Cranfield staff, but will be helpful for writing assignments and theses as well. It will help ensure your writing is consistent in matters such as capital letters, abbreviations, hyphens and naming conventions.
• AskOxford.com Part of the Oxford Dictionaries site, this section provides advice on English grammar, punctuation and spelling.
• HyperGrammar Produced by the University of Ottawa, this guide provides help with points of grammar as well as sentence and paragraph structure.
• The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation This site is essentially an advertisement for the author's book and editing services, but does also provide useful examples of the correct use of punctuation and grammar.
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• Last Updated: May 21, 2024 11:01 AM
• URL: https://library.cranfield.ac.uk/writing

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Accessing past Cranfield theses

You may find it helpful to look at examples of past Cranfield theses when you are writing your own. They may be valuable for reading previous research, and for looking at the structure, style and methodology.

Important note: Please do not use them for referencing advice as we have updated both our Author-Date and Numbered referencing styles in recent years.

Here are the top 3 places to find past Cranfield theses. Please note that some of these are accessible only to specific communities or currently-registered Cranfield staff and students.

1. Masters Theses Archive

The Masters Theses Archive contains online copies of Cranfield Master’s theses since 2006 (but also some older ones).  Search or browse by School, title, author, supervisor or date. The links allow you to download the full-text in PDF. (Access limited to Cranfield staff and students).

2. Shrivenham Repository

Access online theses from Cranfield Defence and Security and the Shrivenham site. (Access limited to CDS staff and students). 

3. CERES, the Cranfield Research Repository

CERES contains the full-text of Cranfield research output, including both DBA and PhD theses. The database is publicly accessible and can either be searched or browsed by community. 

These are only our top three. A full list can be found on the Theses page of our website  but, as always, if you have any questions please  contact us .

Feature image from Pixabay .

Karen Stokes

Written By: Karen Stokes

A Business Librarian since 2009, Karen leads support for the Cranfield MBA courses, both full-time and Executive.

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Research proposal writing guide for prospective students 

What is a research proposal.

A doctoral research proposal outlines the research that a candidate wishes to carry out as part of a programme of supervised doctoral research. Writing your research proposal is your opportunity to tell us about the research you would like to do and gives you the opportunity to articulate your research ideas, demonstrate your critical thinking skills and capacity to undertake a research project, along with your academic writing skills. Many of Cranfield’s doctoral programmes will require you to produce a research proposal as part of the application process. Your research proposal will help us to establish your motivations for carrying out a doctorate and determine whether your proposed research is interesting, significant, necessary and feasible. It also helps us to ensure that we have the supervisory expertise to support your proposed research.

Your research proposal is a concise and coherent summary of your proposed research. It sets out the key issues or questions that your research intends to address, including:

• A summary of your proposed research;
• The key research questions that your research will answer;
• The current state of knowledge in the area you wish to research and how your research contributes to this;
• The originality of your proposed research.

Where do I start?

Select an area of research or a problem that you are passionate about, it will be your focus for at least three years and possibly beyond – so it needs to be interesting to you!

Once you have identified an area of potential study, undertake a literature review of current research in that area. This will help you to evaluate the current state of the literature in that field and allow you to consider how you might create new knowledge which contributes to this literature. Is there a problem which is yet to be addressed or a perspective that has not been taken previously? Or can you identify a 'gap' in the knowledge pool, something that has not been discovered or researched in a particular way before, which you could try to address with your proposed research? Doctoral research needs to create new knowledge and make a contribution but it also needs to be interesting, relevant and important. Just because an area has not been researched before does not make it an appropriate doctoral project!

What do I need to include in my research proposal?

Your research proposal should be approximately 2,000 words, or 4 to 5 pages, and should contain the following:

• Title: A working title for your research proposal, which gives a clear indication of your proposed research project.
• Abstract: A summary of approximately 100 words, where you outline the problem that you want to examine, explain why it is interesting, important and relevant and how you might go about studying it. You should include the central question or issue that your research will be based on.
• Background and rationale: This will form the body of your research proposal. In this section you should confirm the problem your research will address, summarise what the current state of the art is in this area and identify the key conversations and players. Present the results of your literature review and articulate how your research might contribute to this knowledge and extend this literature.
• Research questions/research aims and objectives/research hypothesis: Outline what your provisional research questions might be. There are different ways to structure this; they may take the form of questions, aims and objectives or research hypothesis/es.
• Research methods: In this section you should present your initial thoughts about how you might answer your research question and what methods you propose to use. Your approach should be systematic and structured as your results need to be robust and repeatable. This is the part of your proposal where you can demonstrate your understanding of what research is and what a research project entails.
• Plan of work: This is an outline of the various stages for developing and implementing your research project, together with a timeline. This could be in a Gantt chart that is tailored to your specific project.
• Significance and contribution of the research: Your initial thoughts on what the potential significance of your research is. What will the contribution of your research be to knowledge, literature, theory and/or methodology and what might be the impact of your research on policy, practice or scientific understanding?
• Bibliography/references: The references to the key articles and texts that you have used in preparing your research proposal.

Where can I find more help?

You are not alone. Academics at Cranfield will be happy to help you. Using our ' Find an Expert ' locator you will be able to find an academic at Cranfield who is most aligned with your area of research and get in touch with them. 

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